Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2011
From ACM TechNews
U.s. Commerce Department Calls For Public-Private Partnership on Cybersecurity
The U.S. Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force is urging collaboration between the department and private-sector businesses to establish a set of cybersecurity best practices.
From ACM TechNews
Css 2.1 Emerges as Official Web Standard
The CSS 2.1 standard for Web page formatting has been completed. Although much of the Web world has moved on to CSS 3, the CSS 2.1 standard has reached a key milestone.
From ACM TechNews
Nist Contests in China Put Next-Gen Robot Technologies to the Test
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology recently hosted three of the four robotics competitions at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai.
From ACM TechNews
At&t Researchers Call For Smartphone Apps That Won't Suck Your Battery Dry
AT&T researchers are calling on developers to build more energy-aware apps to conserve battery life in smartphones.
From ACM News
Rsa Gets a Security Chief
RSA, the computer security unit of EMC that was hacked, has named Edward Schwartz as chief security officer, promoting him from the same role at NetWitness, a firm it recently acquired.
From ACM News
Emc's Rsa Security Breach May Cost Bank Customers $100 Million
The security breach at EMC Corp.'s RSA unit may cost the banking industry as much as $100 million to replace identification tokens that left their computers vulnerable to spying.
From ACM News
Many Stuxnet Vulnerabilities Still Unpatched
The media storm over the Stuxnet worm may have passed, but many of the software holes that were used by the worm remain unpatched and leave Siemens customers open to a wide range of potentially damaging cyber attacks, according…
From ACM News
Next Mars Rover Faces Race Against Time, Funding
NASA's next Mars rover faces looming technical, financial, and scheduling challenges before its planned launch in November, according to an internal audit released June 8.
From ACM News
Watson's Lead Developer: 'deep Analysis, Speed, and Results'
David Ferrucci’s official title is "IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center." But to the world, he's the genius behind Watson, the question-answering…
From ACM TechNews
Penn Researchers Develop Biological Circuit Components, New Microscope Technique For Measuring Them
University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a method for integrating biological molecules directly with electronic circuits so they can operate in open-air environments.
From ACM News
Brain Calisthenics For Abstract Ideas
Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine—one is a linear representation of the other—but making those conversions is often…
From ACM News
Ipv6 Day: Kicking the Tires of a Next-Gen Net Today
The computing industry has begun a major 24-hour test today to work the kinks out of IPv6, a disruptive but necessary overhaul of the Internet's inner workings.
From ACM TechNews
A European Project Applies the Social Networking Principle to Scientific Research
Researchers at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid's Ontological Engineering Group are participating in the Wf4Ever project, which is applying the principles of social networking to scientific research.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Research Virtualizes Idle Desktops to Save Power
Microsoft Research India scientists have developed LiteGreen, power-saving technology that can virtualize enterprise desktops in a virtual machine and migrate them between the users' desktop and a virtual server, depending on…
From ACM TechNews
Leia in Your Living Room: Projecting a Star-Wars-Style Hologram With a Microsoft Kinect
Michael Bove, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Object-Based Media Group, recently purchased a Kinect for his graduate students to experiment with--and they used it to create holograms.
From ACM TechNews
Leakage of Private Information From Popular Websites Is Common, New Study Finds
Worcester Polytechnic InstituteWorcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers recently conducted a study of more than 100 popular Web sites and found that about 75 percent of them directly leak either private information or…
From ACM News
After Delay, Hacker to Show Flaws in Siemens Industrial Gear
A security researcher who says he's found serious problems with Siemens computers used in power plants and heavy industry is now expecting to go public with his research at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
From ACM News
Air France Crash Probe Raises Pilot Training Questions
Air France Flight 447 stalled high over the Atlantic Ocean and plunged into the sea even as the pilots repeatedly tried to pull the nose up—a reaction opposite to what was needed to recover from the stall.
From ACM News
The Defenders: Inside an Online Siege
In a quiet, windowless auditorium in Bristol, in the west of England, Lucy Robson and her team hunch over their laptops as the seconds on a giant clock above begin to count down. In a few moments, the enemy will begin the…
From ACM News
Scientists Undeterred By Hubble Successor's Costs
The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is facing cost overruns and years of delay before it launches, but that hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of scientists who are meeting in Baltimore this week to talk about the amazing…
From ACM News
Long Live the Qubit!
A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit in a classical computer can represent either 0 or 1, a quantum…
From ACM TechNews
Internet Architect Vint Cerf to Young People: Science and Tech Careers Can Be Rewarding
Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's original inventors, notes in an interview that although industry awards are important, they do not receive enough visibility.
From ACM TechNews
Building a Better Dam Map
A geographically explicit, high-resolution global database of large dams and reservoirs has been developed by a team of scientists at McGill University.
From ACM TechNews
Researcher Reveals How 'computer Geeks' Replaced 'computer Girls'
As late as the 1960s, computer programming was perceived as a natural career choice for savvy young women, explained historian Nathan Ensmenger in a recent speech at Stanford University.
From ACM News
A Nielsen Acquisition Focused on Brain Waves
The Nielsen Company has acquired the rest of a company, NeuroFocus, that specializes in the nascent realm of researching whether neuroscience can be applied to advertising.
From ACM News
Cisco's Stumble: Did CEO John Chambers Underestimate Silicon Valley Rivals?
Even in the depths of the Great Recession, while other businesses hunkered down, Cisco CEO John Chambers was eager to expand.
From ACM News
How Nations Block Facebook
Last month, Facebook came close to signing up its 700 millionth user. But it is no “friend” of governments—including China, Iran, and Syria—that block it and other social media, like Twitter and YouTube, from their citizens.
From ACM News
Security 'tokens' Take Hit
RSA Security is offering to provide security monitoring or replace its well-known SecurID tokens—devices used by millions of corporate workers to securely log on to their computers—"for virtually every customer we have," the…
From ACM News
Chinese Experts Say Gmail Hacking Accusation Evil-Intentioned
Google lacked evidence to support its accusations that Chinese hackers are behind the alleged cyber attacks on hundreds of its email accounts and the timing to make such accusations is evil-intentioned, Chinese experts said…
From ACM News
Chefs Who Spy? Tracking Google's Hackers in China
From this city of six million, Shandong Lanxiang Vocational School quietly churns out 30,000 mechanics, barbers, and welders each year. One of its triumphs was training chefs who cooked for Olympic athletes at the 2008 Summer…